Just a small taste of what we've been doing the past two days of island hopping.
When looking at our itinerary, I think we were imagining two days of different beaches and splashing in the water. Then we saw that we were going to eight places over the two days, and we thought, "Yikes! I hope we don't get bored of beaching."
Nope. We didn't. No boredom here.
Only because we didn't actually get beach lounge-y time.
No, no, don't be disappointed for us. We got to do way cooler things. Like so much snorkeling that I have a slight bruise on the bridge of my nose. And eating delicious fish cooked just for us by the captain and his sidekick. Not to mention that we have wicked sunburns on our shoulders since that part is constantly out of the water. Hence the two tubes of aloe despite the fact that we overloaded on sunscreen. Nuts.
Anyways, on with the show!
Those bumpy bits in the background are what we centered around for the majority of our visits.
See that orange glow? Here's what it looks like on me:
Mark said that it looked like a highlighter pack threw up on me. Keep in mind that you can't see the bright yellow swimsuit I'm wearing...
And I promise I didn't keep this stellar outfit on. (Sorry, Melissa!)
Some of our visits we're just to see the coral around a teensy rock of an island.
Our favorite one of those was actually around a World War Two ship wreck. You could only see part of it without having to dive underwater for that. We actually had more fun playing with the fish at that spot. They were very funny! One of them kept swimming straight at Mark's face and then swimming away. One of the other boats kept dumping chunks of rice into the water that the fish would then swarm over to eat. We're talking hundreds of tropical fish, the kind that you see in the movies. So cool.
The rest of it looked something like this:
Pulling up to a freshwater lake...
Tying on to another boat, just like ours...
Climbing up and down some stairs...
Stashing our stuff on some rocks...
Seeing the lay of the land...
Time to jump in!
At the end of yesterday's excursion, we went to a beach for our last hop. While we were looking for a peaceful paradise, we got a major Filipino fiesta instead!
There were probably 100 people between the small beach, the handful of boats, and all the water. The most hilarious part was that the major entertainment seemed to be the multiple potato sack races going down.
We walked around a bit, had two boys chasing each other in circles around us, and then headed back for the night.
Sleep.....
This morning was pretty cloudy, but the weather held out nice for us.
Time for another lake to snorkel in!
Remember how I said we needed to climb up and then climb down to the lake? This is from the top of such a climb, looking back to where the boat was parked.
Not bad, right?
After this was a rock to dive around. I was taking a break and lounging on the boat while Mark splashed around, when I noticed this rock sticking up in the water. Wait, there's this weird yellow and black striped protrusion... Wait, it's floating...
It's a turtle!! A turtle swimming by! Probably 18 inches!
I was so surprised (and it took me so long to figure out what it was) that by the time I got my camera out and up to my face, he was nowhere to be seen.
Bummer.
Mark was probably 20 feet from it, but could not see it from the water.
Next stop was the Twin Lagoons, connected by a tiny little tunnel. You can kind of see the light gray opening by the rock in the water. The stairs are there so that you can access the other lagoon when the water level is too high to use the water way.
The water was cold here, so we didn't stay long and moved to our next spot, Mark's favorite dive spot of them all.
It was nice to have the place to ourselves for awhile before the water got too choppy to swim in.
We decided to call it quits then and had a very splashy boat ride back to town. (Our two boat guys might have been laughing at all the cackling I was doing.)
Or night has been eventful in that we found a nice coffee shop with good WIFI. Cause for celebration! We also watched a little of the local Nativity play, done with jingle pop Christmas music and animatronics. We came in just in time for the camels to be singing the introduction.
Not in view is a "cloud" that hides an angel that comes down for his part of the story.
We would have stayed except the mosquitoes have been especially vicious today. :(
Tomorrow is New Year's Eve in Manila!
Thinking of you and wishing you were here!
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